The standard argument, “Who’s ever going to use this in real life?” doesn’t apply to Biology 100. This general education requirement is valuable to any person’s breadth of knowledge. Ribosomes, cellular respiration, endoplasmic reticulum, reactants, and whatever else the proverbial “they” decide to teach us is fine with me. What’s not fine with me, however, is the format of the class and lab periods.
Any proponent of biology labs can say that doing something will help an individual learn, but the amount of wasted time that the structured Biology class has built into it is silly for both the instructor and the students.
Anyone who has taken Biology 100 knows about the three-week macromolecule lab that is repetitive and insulting to students. Last week, for the second part of the lab, I spent an hour and a half doing something I had already done, already learned, already digested in the first part.
There is something appalling about the structure of biology. The teacher, it seems, is not allowed to teach in his or her own style, but rather must do what is dictated to them from above. If the professors aren’t instructed to teach it, they skip it, and the student suffers by not gaining any enrichment. Certainly, the labs are not fulfilling this need.
Why must the biology department insult us by writing labs that are designed not for me to learn but to fill time and make me feel like a mouse in a wheel?
This brings me to Blackboard. It is already the middle of the semester and my teacher, who needs help learning how to use Blackboard, has only two grades posted. Confusion about due dates, “Is this due before class? Can it be done minutes before? What about the night before?” is rampant. What are we to do when a system is dictating what needs to be learned, but does not give their professors the proper support to execute their mouse-in-the-wheel plan?
Biology 100 needs to be modified in order to keep it simple and not waste anyone’s time. Maybe I’m just lucky, but the content that I learned in Biology my freshman year of high school is the same content I am “learning” now. The class discredits the university’s commitment to academics because it promotes inefficient standardization of curriculum. I would say more, but I have to post some biology journals on Blackboard….